Case Number 18125: Small Claims Court

ACT OF GOD

The Charge

Meditations on lightning, life, and chance.

The Case

The power of lightning is awe-inspiring. It is speculated that a lightning
strike caused the chain reaction that generated life on Earth. Yet, lightning
giveth and lightning taketh away. Its destructive force is almost unfathomable,
obliterating almost anything unfortunate enough to come into contact with it.
For those who are struck by lighting and miraculously survive or witness
somebody struck, the event is profoundly changing. We talk about the
astronomical odds of it happening to us but, when it does happen, the victims
have to wonder if something bigger than them has caused it. Jennifer Baichwal
(Manufactured Landscapes), director of Act of God, couches her
documentary in these terms. In speaking to people who have survived or witnessed
the death of others about the effect their experience had on them, she explores
the idea of chance versus divine intervention, and the startlingly blurry line
between the two.

Act of God opens with author Paul Auster, who discusses the idea of
the chance encounter, prevalent in his work, and how his obsession with it comes
down to one incident. On a camp hike, a friend of his was struck by lightning.
Had their positions been reversed, or had they been slowed by only a few steps,
Auster would have died. He is no believer in the divine and insists that he
doesn't want to ascribe that to the incident, yet he must ask himself why it was
that boy and not him. There's no answer to this question and, as a result, he
has become obsessed.

Likewise, Baichwal interviews people of disparate backgrounds with disparate
levels of religious belief. Almost at once, we can see how differently their
stories play out and how similar their reactions are. We have a small community
in Mexico devastated by a lightning strike that killed a number of children
praying at a hillside cross; a man who died after lightning went through his
phone and into his brain, only to return to Earth to be a self-help guru;
another writer, James O'Reilly, whose story is both horrifying and beautiful,
and will not be spoiled here. For each, the event was life-changing and, no
matter how they initially reacted to it, the final result is a calm acceptance
of what happened, whether that comes through the idea of God calling his
children home or of understanding that a chance encounter is no more than that.
In neither case is there much good in questioning it.

Most interesting artistically, and most telling of the core idea in Act
of God, is the inclusion of improvisational guitar legend Fred Frith. While
he doesn't have a direct experience with lightning, he's brought in for a
control experiment on chance. They record his brain waves while playing from
memory and again while improvising. The memory-scan looks like any normal brain
scan, gibberish to me, but average looking. The improv-scan, however, more
closely resembles an abstract painting than anything to do with science. While
bizarre on the surface, the theory is that, since brain waves are tiny lightning
strikes, Frith's brain during the improvisation is firing irregularly in many
different places at once. If each of these firings is a "chance
encounter," Frith's body acts a kind of conduit for these encounters that
manifests itself through the guitar. Is it random? In a way, it is, but Frith is
doing something deliberate here as well, making sounds based instinctually off
the way he feels. Part chance and part direct action, this experiment sheds more
light on the subject than the interviews do. The performance, on top of it, is
stunning.

If there's a negative in Act of God, it's that there is no clear aim
with the narrative. Unlike most documentaries, this is more philosophical musing
than storytelling, which leads us on a meandering path. The individual stories
are compelling enough, however, and the natural footage is brilliant enough,
that people who ordinarily crave a strong narrative should still be
satisfied.